7 Ways to Get the Best from Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers always worry about how effective their digital marketing strategies are. They worry about how these strategies help their businesses to grow. If at any point in time they discover that the strategies they are using are not working for them as expected, they take steps to rejig them for better results. In your own business, whenever you observe that your marketing campaign is not working well to your satisfaction, it is a very clear sign that your business is in a vulnerable position. That is when something just has to be done and done fast too. A good look at your digital marketing strategy is the first logical step in that wise. Smart digital marketing demands it as a basic step, since most businesses rely heavily on effective marketing for their survival and steady growths. To get the best from your digital marketing strategy, don’t ignore the following. 

 
1. Have a Formal Digital Marketing Strategy

You must first be sure to have a marketing strategy and it works for your business. Not having one is always a very grave marketing error that stunts business growth. If you have a digital marketing plan in your overall marketing strategy, your business benefits immensely. By putting all the elements together in an effective way, doing all you should do at the right and proper time, your strategy becomes effective as a result. Of course, you can only know how well you are doing, if you have the right tools in place to track your results and monitor your progress.

2. Use Your Marketing Budget Prudently

Smart marketers always have a very keen eye on marketing costs. This is with a view to better organizing their marketing budgets and in delivering higher Returns on Investments, ROIs. For this reason, budget analysis/management in digital marketing becomes hugely important. By relying more on the most cost-effective techniques in your digital marketing strategy, you can better manage your marketing budget more prudently.

3. Target the Right Audience

You dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily if you habitually “shoot at everything that flies” in your marketing activities. Effective targeting is what gets the best results. If you fully identify and understand the ideal audience for your products, you can market to them directly for good results. For this reason, if you know your audience well enough, you can effectively tailor your digital marketing activities to fit them. These activities entail the right content, the right type of marketing medium/channel and the right message you are conveying. It is always very important therefore, to have a plan for targeting customers and potential customers who share a lot in common in a specific and effective way. Targeting the right audience in your marketing efforts, is not only a cost-effective thing to do, it gets the best results.

4. Pay Attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A good search engine optimization, SEO technique on your website helps to get it noticed by search engines. It requires a careful and tactical use of keywords and alt tags in your content and headlines. When correctly used, they have a large amount of influence on your SEO. They help search engines particularly Google to rank your website well in its SERPs. That is what easily becomes available to searchers first when in need of information. Your website directly benefits by way of good organic traffic from such search results. Because search engines tend to change their algorithms from time to time, be sure to keep an eye on these changes and to update your SEO techniques in tandem to avoid penalties from search engines. Such penalties may have adverse effects your business online.

5. Connect with Influencers

It remains a good marketing strategy to develop good relations with influencers and to depend on their large following to grow your business. Because of their effectiveness, making some investments in connecting with influencers is a good marketing strategy. Making this investment is usually worth the while because it tends to engender higher ROI for the marketer. This is why marketing with influencers is always worth it and a large percentage of marketers think so as well. Many see it as a very effective marketing strategy because of the good results it gives. For best results, it is advisable to make some deliberate efforts to source the right influencer to work with and who suits and promotes your brand better. That kind of influencer can easily help to create a huge awareness for your brand and help to boost sales/revenue for your business.

6. Use Paid Social Media Ads

Social media platforms have become very popular with digital marketers because of their immense popularity and ease of sharing information. They now serve as very important platforms for marketers to build and grow their audiences very quickly. With their customized in-house analytics, marketers benefit by building greater insights into their marketing efforts free of cost. These benefits can be boosted with additional paid ads that are cost-effective too. Promoting your brand on social media without any paid advertising is usually time consuming and may not even guarantee any appreciable increase in your audience. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is good to invest in paid ads on social media. Doing so will not only help you to better target your audience, but also, it will help transform your page into a very popular page and a top leads generator as a result.

7. Market with all the Platforms

Expert marketers like to advise marketers not to ignore any marketing channel/platform in their digital marketing strategy. All channels have their own advantages and peculiarities and the results they deliver vary as well. Content marketing, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, inforgraphics, video marketing etc. must be part of your marketing strategy for better effectiveness. What matters is to be very active when using most of these channels. If you regularly post fresh and informative content related to your brand/product on daily basis, it will help your page to get more traffic and to build a larger audience. For better and direct audience targeting particularly on social media, it is very important to understand how their algorithms work. You can rely on hashtags to post information according to your audience’s online stats to get insights and a brief of your audience. Doing so will enable you to have a better use of hashtags and keywords to target your audience based on such hugely important marketing demographics like age, education, employment, profession, gender, marital/parental status, and interests. You get better results as well. 

5 Digital Marketing Tips to Grow Your Small Business

If you are involved in digital marketing and you want to grow your business online, you must find ways to take advantage of constantly evolving digital technology. These technologies play a very significant role to enable many small businesses to have a very robust online presence. The bottom line to digital marketing online activities is to be able to attract good traffic to your website. Doing so consistently helps to get good leads, customers and eventual good sales. To enhance that, these here, 5 digital marketing tips come in very handy.
 
1. Create a User-Friendly and Attractive Website for Your Business

Your website is your dependable business window in virtual business world. For this reason, it is very important for your business survival and growth to have an attractive, user-friendly and informative website for your business. That is the type of website that can help your potential customers and customers even if they have different and diverse backgrounds, to easily do business with you. For best results, you must ensure that your website is dynamic, optimized and responsive to different gadgets like laptops, tablets, and mobile devices particularly smartphones.

2. Don’t Ignore Your Customers’ Opinions
 
If you are a marketer, there is no doubt you are aware that you are in business because of your customers. Doing business online requires that you have a real footprint in digital space.  By having an online footprint for your business, you acquire the ability to interact directly with your customers in an unfettered manner. Such interactions help to make your customers feel like their opinions matter, are being heard, that they are valued and are very important to your business. Do not ignore your customers’ opinions. If you value their opinions and they get to know, your business can as a result get some brand loyalty from them. There is an additional benefit of their word-of-mouth publicity for your businesses because of their brand loyalty. This can directly help your business to rake in more and more leads, customers and even better sales.

3. List Your Business on Google My Business

Make sure you list your business on Google My Business, GMB, with such vital business information as Name of business, Business location, Services provided, and Contact information. Most marketers are now aware that GMB listing has become an effective search tool many marketers now effectively use worldwide. It is a hugely effective Google search tool. If for instance someone is trying to locate a business/service near them, they can simply type “Mechanic Near Me” keyword option on Google. Google will immediately display a list of businesses/services dealing in that particular business/service in their vicinity. Most online searchers habitually search their localities first to do business. For this reason, you can take a quick advantage of that by creating a GMB listing for your business.
 
4. Get Your Business on Social Media

Getting your business on social media is akin to taking it where your customers are. In this age and time, nearly everyone is now on social media. Because of the unique features and immense popularity of social media platforms, they create room for easy and very wide forum for sharing online information. Creating a business page in some social media platforms for your business is thus a very good idea. That idea can be of very huge benefit for your marketing efforts. Many marketers are now aware that a major part of the global population prefers to get their queries answered on social media. The reason is, social media is where nearly everyone appears to be at for varied social/business reasons right now. On social media, you can easily spread more awareness about your business, interact easily with prospective clients, market to them, and rake in more leads, customers and sales.

5. Run Ads on Social Media  

Apart from the fact that social media ads can be budget-friendly, they allow you to directly target the right customer demographics. So, you can always take real marketing advantage of these demographics for better results. Some in-house and unique social media features allow you to do this with ease. These unique features of social media allow you to specify the gender, age and interest of your prospective customer. Social media ads are most effective when used for the local vicinity such as surrounding cities/communities close to your business. By adding specific demographic details of your potential customers in local community ads, you can get a better and more effective reach. It allows you to better target and impress the right customers by way of a better and more effective leads conversion.  

9 Effective Startup Digital Marketing Strategies

No matter what expert marketers say, building an online business is by no means easy. Least of all, a successful start-up, which at times is a very huge battle to get noticed online! Everyone gets to fight against very fierce competition in today’s business world. Getting noticed and patronized is what everyone out there craves for. For a start-up, your chances are brightest if you carefully use some effective digital marketing strategies to help launch your business out there. With the internet, things can become fairly easier since almost everyone now has access to the internet. This is a digital age remember! If you can handle the online marketing aspect of your business correctly, your start-up gets brighter chances of succeeding and flourishing.

Here are a few tested strategies which can help you out in that quest.

#1. Content Marketing

This involves writing and getting your message out there in form of what you know and want to share with others for their own benefits. It is providing valuable information to help others solve their problems. Content marketing is a strategic approach to modern digital marketing efforts. It is where blogs and bloggers become highly relevant in the marketing process.  Online, all bloggers are focused on creating, publishing, and distributing quality content for a specially targeted audience. This relationship helps to build a base for drawing traffic which ends up becoming potential clients/customers and customers.

#2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Any content not read online is not useful for online marketing efforts. It takes search engines to help rank and distribute content online for the benefit of readers. For that reason, every content needs optimization for search engines like Google, Yahoo and others. Search engine optimization, SEO, is a methodology involving strategies, techniques and tactics most bloggers use to achieve the sole objective of a high-ranking placement in the search results pages, SERP of search engines. The higher they rank your website content, the more traffic they send to it.


 
#3. Influencer Marketing

Welcome to the world of celebrities and influencers. Depending on what your business is, if you have the endorsement of persons with large social media followers, you get traffic and patronage through such influence. Simple ads from influencers get to reach millions of followers easily because of the influence of social media. Persons with large followership in social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram by mere words of mouth can help build a formidable and trusted brand. Reason, the growing trend on social media mostly revolves around influencers. Potential customers and customers easily trust the authenticity of products/services linked to influencers. If you are a brand, that helps to influence customers to get engaged with your brand.

#4. Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence, AI

Chatbots are like intelligent talking machines. Instead of humans, you can easily deploy chatbots in your frontline base to assist potentials customers take business decisions. Chatbots are usually imbued with Artificial Intelligence AI, with which they can engage in meaningful business conversations with customers and potential customers. Start-ups for cost reasons cannot afford to hire many people for their customer service departments. That is the gap chatbots step up to fill. When properly deployed, chatbots usually work with pop-up text messages which you cannot fail to notice as a website visitor on mostly the top right hand corner of the website as soon as the landing page opens. That is where they nicely welcome website visitors and invite engagement.

#5. Web Analytics

Every start-up needs analytics to help make meaning out of the dark recess of zillions of activities on the internet. For that reason, web analytics is a must-have tool for start-up digital marketers. When deployed, they help to collect, analyze, measure and report website data for understanding and optimizing web pages. The analysis of Internet data and user information through various means is referred to by expert marketers as Web Analytics. Data concerning traffic, its source and what keywords that bring them to your website can be deciphered for web analytics data. Google web analytics is about the most popular and easy to deploy in this category.

#6. Social Media Marketing 

These days and around the world, nearly everyone who has easy access to the internet is on social media. Really huge market no doubt! Social media has thus become a major marketing platform and an increasingly rising trend for promoting products and services online. It is simple to use and deploy by creating and sharing content on social media networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others. The first thing a start-up really needs to do is to create business profiles on as many of the social media platforms as convenient and suitable for the type of business to be promoted. From these platforms, you gradually build trust and followership which benefits your brand. Getting out a promotional message to millions of people is fairly very easy on social media platforms. The real reason they are very good places to build a brand from. The mere presence of a business on most major social media platforms is a very smart primary step for start-ups to build brand trust and influence in the target market.

#7. Digital Advertising
 
Just like billboards carrying ads offline on the streets and highways, digital advertising is the promotion of your business on the internet. The usage of the internet as a unique platform for promotional work requires its own techniques designed for effective on the internet. Specially worded messages deliberately and uniquely deployed to be noticed be search engines help to make digital advertising very effective. These unique massages get deployed by banner ads, text ads, emails, social media ads, blogs, mobile apps and other marketing channels available and effective in the digital media space.

#8. Optimizing for Video Search

Advertising professionals now say “effects” is always very useful for every online ads massage. That is where videos alongside text ads are becoming increasingly popular. The videos help provide most of the “effects”. Even search engines can now index videos for search purposes. So, if you optimize your video messages alongside your text ads, the messages reach farther and are more effective. Most online surfers like to see video ads alongside text ads. In fact, the videos are usually more attention-captivating than even the text ads they accompany. For effects, you must habitually rename your videos with the relevant keywords then add the keywords in your video description as well. Marketing experts believe that adding videos to a start-up website makes the start-up to achieve a more significant market presence and growth much faster.

#9. Optimizing for Voice Search
 
With the improvements and updates in their algorithms, search engines now distinctly recognize sounds and voices. For that reason, digital marketers now benefit from voice optimization. Welcome to audio digital marketing! Voice search technology has become an excellent step for improving user experience for devices such as telephones and audio CDs now widely used by a huge population on the go. Start-ups because of their characteristic low ads budgets can benefit a great deal from these cost-effective devices in their marketing efforts.

How To Brand Your Business With Digital Marketing

According to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.” It is that important. Every business depends heavily on its brand to attain any measure of success in our hugely competitive markets whether through traditional marketing or digital marketing. Digital marketing means promoting your products/services on the internet by way of Google Ads, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, etc. Whereas Traditional marketing means promoting such products/services by way of banner ads, flyers, brochures, templates, Radio and TV, etc, These are all in a marketing effort to build trust among customers because no brand ever gets any measure of success without first building trust and relationship with customers. In the entire branding process, you must take into account three elements of customer trust which are, promise, competence, and integrity.

Here are some tested and proven ways to build your brand through digital marketing:

Content Marketing

This involves both visual and written content posted regularly on your website/blog. It means marketing your products/services through content updates which must be related to your business particularly the products/services you have on offer. That is what helps to put out there what your business should be known for which becomes the brand known to your customers. 

Search Engine Optimization, SEO Marketing
 
If you want your business to be noticed widely online, search engines must first find and rank it. Top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing not only find your business but help it to rank at the top of their search results page if your content and website is well liked by customers. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, works best for long term marketing results by continually sending traffic to your website if the site is ranked high enough for such benefits. It is one great way to brand your business online.

Social Media Marketing 
 
These days, nearly everyone is on social media. You build your brand easily by getting it out there where nearly everyone is. That means promoting your products/services through different social media platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. Because of ease of use, sharing of content and popularity of social media, it makes branding fairly straight forward and easy. This you do through regular posting of pictures, images, videos and infographics to attract customers and build your brand.

Google Ads

You can use Google Ads for both branding and selling of products/services because they entail display ads, search ads, YouTube ads and shopping ads which all have different goals. Display ads help in the branding of a business, products/services while Search ads help in getting sales. YouTube ads help in engagement and awareness of your brand while Shopping ads help in promoting e-commerce businesses. 

 

10 Simple Ways to Earn Cool Money Online

The Internet has become some form of goldmine within which anyone willing to do honest work can earn a comfortable living. When I started out in year 2012, I was just playing around until I soon discovered how to turn play time into income-earning time. It took me quite some time to master the ropes a bit though.  From my experience, anyone can make money online even if they know next to nothing about online marketing, social media, or even SEO. You can quickly learn the ropes like I did if you are smart enough. I can now comfortably recommend at least 10 ways I have used and others are using to make legitimate cool money online. Here they are but not necessarily listed in any particular order of importance.

#1: Affiliate Marketing

This is readily the most popular and most common way to earn money legitimately online.  Most websites selling products and services rely heavily on affiliates to help push their products/services on the web. When a product/service gets sold on account of the marketing efforts of an affiliate, the affiliate gets a pre-agreed percentage of the sale as commission. The more products you are able to help sell, the more money you make. Presently, SFI prides itself as the #1 Affiliate Marketing Business online. That is for good reasons because they practically lead every affiliate by the hand to make money. With SFI, you can earn anything from #5,000 to $100,000 per year at full blast on a deep downline you must have built over some time.

#2: Google Adsense

This is one great way to earn money from your website or blog. By the time you get a good blog going, the next thing is to monetize it. This you do by applying to Google for a Google Adsense code. This is the code Google gives out to marketers at its own very strict discretion. Once you insert the code on your website/blog, you are good to go. Google kicks in at this stage and does the rest under its own very strict rules and regulations. You get paid any time someone clicks on the ads Google displays via that code on your site and/or makes a purchase. That way, you can earn a monthly paycheck of $100-$5000 depending on how popular your blog is as judged by the traffic it gets on daily basis.


 
#3: Selling Stuff Online
 
This is fairly simple and straight forward i suppose. From my experience, most people do sell stuff easily online. The more stuff you sell, the more money you make. Ever heard of garage sales? This is one way to sell off old stuff you have been accumulating in your garage over the years. It will amaze you the good number of people looking for old stuff to buy online. If you run a physical shop, you can advertise to your followers on social media particularly YouTube, facebook, twitter and Instagram and you get orders as a result. You may choose to advertise on free sites like craigslist.org to get buyers. One very dependable way to make money online is to sell stuff in a great way using the internet to earn cool money! You can make up to $1500 per month selling stuff, any stuff online.

#4: Digital Products
 
You’ve got to be good at creating digital products to earn money here. There are all kinds of digital products out there online created by others even if you are unable to create them yourself. All you need do is to get a resale permit or resell license from the original owners of the digital products and you are in business. Many people are online daily looking for information. If you have well-packaged eBooks or how-to videos on any popular topics or business niches in high demand, you can sell them online to make money. Making up to $1000 per month selling digital products is common amongst marketers.

#5: Brand Sponsorships

Most brands who really want to sell well and get a good market share are often willing to pay for some sort of sponsorship package that includes written content, videos, social shares, and more. Many brands do pay for saying something good about their brands online.  If you are very popular on social media, particularly on facebook, twitter, pinterest and others, and if you have a very huge followership and audience, you can make cool money from brand sponsorship. Brand owners are ever willing to pay for the sponsorship of their brands, if your social media background is hugely impressive. Some $500-$5000 can be made monthly if you get to know the ropes about brand sponsorship.

#6: Display Ads

With display ads on your website/blog, you get to make money when the ads are viewed online. Somehow, display ads are an extension of Google Adsense where the reader doesn’t just have to click on the ad for you to make money. You get paid in two ways. These are Pay Per View, PPV and Pay Per Click, PPC, both recognized and valued by Google Adsense code. Display ads play the same role on your website/blog just as billboard ads on roadsides or highways. With display ads, you get paid based on the number of times your displayed ads are viewed no matter what. For that reason, these ads work better and earn good money for you if your website/blog traffic is really high. Popular blogs earn as much as $5000 monthly from display ads alone.

#7: Sponsored Posts

Many companies pay people to write about and promote their products/services in form of sponsored posts. It is sort of similar to sponsored brands, the only difference being that the posts are not directly about brands but about specific products/services. With a sponsored post, a company pays you to talk about their product or service on their website if you have the clout and authority to command belief. If you are a known and respected authority in any field related to the product or service, you can make $2000-$5000 per month from sponsored posts alone.


 
#8: YouTube Ads

YouTube currently enjoys a special niche online as a video exchange site. It is extremely popular for that. You can easily set up your own onsite account and start posting your own videos. Good money is made from ads in onsite accounts which have a large followership and popularity. The more the ads are viewed, the more money you make. Google Adsense code helps out also in this process. YouTube ads are fairly easy to set up because all you have to do is turn on ads every time you publish a video. Most marketers earn more money with this strategy as they build and enlarge their viewership. Some earn up to $5000 per month from just turning on YouTube ads embedded with Google Adsense codes.

#9: Freelance Writing

This requires some proven and tested expertise and there is no running away from it. Without knowing what to write and how to write it to impress others, you can’t be a good freelance writer. Many freelance writers earn some $100-$1000 per article depending on the niche and the writer’s authority. Freelance writing enables you to gain exposure and authority as you write along. That helps to increase the demand for your services and ultimately improved and enhanced earnings as a result.

#10: Consultancy/Coaching

Consultancy/Coaching is the niche of authoritative experts online. You can package and sell full courses inclusive of certification online. Through webinars, you can directly offer real time lectures worldwide and earn good money for your efforts. You can coach online for business strategies, health and wellness, hunting, hiking, swimming, body building and any topic of your choice where you have undisputed know-how and expertise. How much you earn depends on the type of niche you are involved in. Some high flying Executive Coaches/Consultants make around $200-$350 per hour coaching or consulting for sundry businesses.

Last Line!

Not everyone may find all these methods suitable for them to earn money online because our individual competences and backgrounds vary very diversely. That’s OK! Just find and settle for any you believe you can make money with and not necessarily all of them. If you do that, you are good to go and you too will start making clean and legitimate money online with your own efforts. Get started right now if you are not already on. A delay means loss of money which you can least afford. 

 

How to Advertise to Reach a Specific Target Group

There is a wise saying in Africa, “if you want to catch monkeys, go to monkey trails.” In similar vein, if you want to advertise to a specific target group, go to where the group can be found. Take the following steps.

1. Identify the group you want to reach.
2. Design an ad which appeals to your identified group.
3. Locate where the group can be found.
4. Beam your ads to that area.
5. Monitor your results.

That is all you need do if you want to reach a specific target group. That is what brings good results.

How to Learn to Write Effective Ads in SFI Business

I am happy to talk about the word “learn.” Yes indeed! That is what we are all doing in SFI on daily basis, simply learning the business day in day out. We can all learn to write adds if we do not want to use the free ads SFI has made available to all affiliates. Personally, I am not good at writing ads so I use SFI free ads. That is what I always recommend for others to use. 

 
If however you want to learn to write your own ads, there are many places on the web you can learn about ads and how to write them. Just like me, even if you have no experience or have not written any ads before, you can still write effective ads using these sites and reading other ads written by others. There are ads you can read about on the web from some internet social websites, newspapers, magazines and even in SFI.

If you really want to write your own ads, be sure that the ads are catchy enough to attract your target audience. To be able to guarantee that, make sure your text ads contain one or more of the following words:

1. Fast
2. Guaranteed
3. Limited
4. Easy/Simple
5. Testimonial
6. Discount/Sales
7. Free
8. Important
9. You/Your
10. New

If you manage to design ads which have one or more of these words, the ads will be catchy enough to “arrest” your target audience. That is what matters not just designing ads for the sake of designing ads. Anyone can learn with practice to do things right. Good luck!!!